Description

With his elegant prose and perceptive imagination, the bestselling author of The Crimson Petal and the White creates a unique, self-contained world, where the perennial human drama plays out in all its passion and ambiguity. In these acclaimed novellas, Michel Faber takes on the interior world of inventively crafted characters. "The Courage Consort" tells of an a capella vocal ensemble sequestered in a Belgian chateau to rehearse a monstrously complicated new piece. But competing artistic temperaments and sexual needs create as much discordance as the avant-garde music. In "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps," a lonely woman joins an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey and unearths a mystery involving a long-hidden murder. In "The Fahrenheit Twins," strange children, identical in all but gender and left alone at the icy zenith of the world by their anthropologist parents, create their own ritual civilization.show more

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Back cover copy

"The evocative language and intriguing glimpses of unfamiliar worlds that dazzled readers of The Crimson Petal and the White are here in abundance."--Los Angeles Times
Bestselling author Michel Faber has created unique dramas in these tender, wise, and often funny tales of isolated people in wholly original settings. Faber's rich imagination is keenly in play as his inventive characters come together to unearth a long-hidden murder mystery surrounding an ancient monument, work out artistic and sexual differences as they rehearse one of the most challenging musical pieces ever written, and create strange civilizations when left to their own devices.
"In all of these eerily beautiful tales, Faber's characters are bewildered solipsists, forced to piece together impenetrable worlds of blank pages, uncanny dissonances and subterranean emotions."--The New York Times Book Review
"The collection's haunting originality solidifies Faber's place among today's most versatile writers."--Time Out New York
Michel Faber is the author of the bestselling The Crimson Petal and the White, Some Rain Must Fall, and Under the Skin, a finalist for the Whitbread Award. His work has been published in twenty countries and received several literary awards. He lives in Scotland.show more

Review quote

PRAISE FOR THE COURAGE CONSORT
"Exotic and willfully unpredictable . . . Taken together, the stories have an unusually wide range. Mr. Faber finds odd ways to fuse brittle civility, gallows humor and a sense of real peril."--Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"The evocative language and intriguing glimpses of unfamiliar worlds that dazzled readers of The Crimson Petal and the White are here in abundance."--Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Timesshow more

Rating details

1,057 ratings

3.38 out of 5 stars

5
13% (140)

4
31% (332)

3
40% (422)

2
12% (126)

1
4% (37)

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